


First Responders

by PlumOolong



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon Related, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Medical Trauma, Original Character(s), Outer Space, Pain, Post-Episode: s07e01 Asylum of the Daleks, Pre-Episode: s07e05 The Angels Take Manhattan, Psychic Abilities, Rescue, Rescue Missions, Spaceships, Team Bonding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-20
Updated: 2019-09-20
Packaged: 2020-10-24 22:09:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20713316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlumOolong/pseuds/PlumOolong
Summary: Amy and Rory's vacation weekend with the Doctor takes a turn as the TARDIS whisks them away to answer a distress call. They find a disabled cargo ship, its cheery AI, and its pilot who is screaming in pain from no obvious source. Rory must use his nursing skills to keep the pilot alive, Amy must work on her own to fix the ship and the Doctor must rely on the power of his mind to get to the alien entity at the bottom of the mystery--if he can do it without breaking the TARDIS or himself.





	First Responders

**Author's Note:**

> Set in season 7 somewhere between "Asylum of the Daleks" and "The Angels Take Manhattan". Contains spoilery references to various major revelations of season 6.

The TARDIS doors flew open. “All aboard, Ponds! Please knock the sand off your shoes before coming inside and Amy, try not to knock into anything with that hat.”

“You’re the last one to talk about hats, Mister Fezes-are-Cool.” Accompanied by the background sound of Rory snickering, Amy strode into the control room wearing loose shorts, a gauzy, striped cover-up and the sort of hat that only an intergalactic beach-side tourist trap could get away with selling. It was salmon pink, with a ridiculously wide, floppy brim and an anemone-flowered hat band emblazoned with the catchphrase “Beachalgeuse: Beach of the Big Stars”. She was also grinning like a fool enamoured with their own joke.

“Fezes _are_ cool.” The Doctor, whose main dress concession to their outing had been to abandon his coat and roll up his sleeves, followed her as far as the door frame, catching himself on the sides and hanging there for a moment, swinging with giddy energy. “Big floppy advertisements sold out a cart at a seaside tourist trap are very not cool and you only got it on a dare. Rory, tell her—”

“Nope! Not getting involved!” Rory, in sandals, swim trunks and t-shirt, ducked under the Doctor’s arm and hurried out of the way like a man who knew he was not going to win an argument about his wife’s clothing.

“It’s my vacation—” Amy said.

“_Our_ vacation,” Rory muttered, not completely bereft of pride.

“—our vacation, and I can buy a completely silly hat if I want to.”

“Well I guess it’s too late to go back and get a refund,” the Doctor said, hopping the rest of the way through the door.

The TARDIS doors slammed shut. Without anyone at the controls, the sound of the dematerilization sequence kicked in. The three travelers froze.

“Definitely too late,” the Doctor said.

“Doctor, what’s going on?” Rory cautiously approached the console, trying to make some sense of the dials and readouts while carefully not touching anything.

“Yes, what _is_ going on, old girl?” The Doctor jumped to a display screen and began punching buttons. “So very impatient all of a sudden. Oh, we’re rematerializing already! Coordinates, same solar system…twelve minutes ago…”

“—an automated emergency message from the cargo freighter _Selene_, Galactic Federation registration N2ACN, under contract with the Emindar Trade Cartel.” A metallic, female voice came on through the comm system. “Unplanned contact with orbital debris has knocked out my navigation system. My pilot is incapacitated and I am unable to evacuate to safety. Please respond. This is an automated emergency message…”

“Cargo freighter Selene, this is The Doctor.” The Doctor, sprung into motion like a snapped piano wire, grabbed the intercom microphone and began talking very quickly. “Clear an airlock for us and send me your schematics. We can be there in about a minute.”

Amy and Rory looked at each other.

“Right. I better lose the hat.”

“I’ll grab some trousers and my nurse’s bag,” Rory said, already jogging up the spiral stairs to their quarters.

“You brought your nursing bag on our vacation?” Amy said, somewhat accusingly, as she followed him.

“It’s a vacation with the Doctor. I figure odds are I’d need it at some point.”

#

The three of them made a hasty exit from the TARDIS once it had materialized in the hallway in front of the ship’s airlock. It was all very grey, with a diamond-pattern metal plate floor and conduit pipes melded into the walls and just enough lighting to provide a clear path. Amy and Rory had both donned jeans and sensible shoes. Rory had a black nylon tote slung over one shoulder. The Doctor hadn’t done anything about his appearance, but he hesitated slightly as he stepped over the threshold. “Right. Here we are, Selene. Which—”

Down the corridor came the sound of a woman’s hoarse scream.

They all started running toward it.

As they were running, a white sphere with blinking blue lights swung around a corner from a guide rail in the ceiling. “Oh! How…? Never mind! This way!” It reversed course and began leading them down the corridor.

“You’re Selene?” Amy said.

“Correct! I am this ship’s intelligence. My pilot is a human-derivitive from Emindar. Federation law mandates all spacecraft over a certain tonnage must have an actual person in command. She fulfills that requirement.”

“A ship this size generally has a crew of around ten,” the Doctor said. “Where are the rest?”

“Through me, many ship functions are automated, rendering more crew superfluous. The annual shareholder report from the Cartel calls it ‘a fantastic cost saving measure.’”

“Yes, I’m sure,” the Doctor muttered. “Rather cutting it to the bone, aren’t they? It works splendidly until something goes wrong. Whoop, here we are!”

They emerged in the ship’s cockpit, which in terms of size and function resembled a studio flat laid out in an oversized hallway. There was a faintly stuffy smell and a scattering of empty food containers on the console. The screamer was a human-looking woman writhing on the floor beneath the pilot’s chair, dressed in a blue jumpsuit that was slightly too large for her petite frame. A berth and storage were slotted into one wall, kitchenette and workspace were jammed into the other side, and the ships controls enveloped the far end, the viewscreen showing a peach-and-pinkish gas giant looming in the neighbourhood.

Rory sprinted ahead, yanking at the straps and zippers of his bag. “How long has she been like this?” he said. “Any physical injury?”

“Currently, 9 minutes and 38 seconds,” Selene replied. The ship’s sphere glided into a docking station with a click. “Only injury was a couple small bumps. She was fine, and then she started screaming and collapsed. Behaviour analysis suggests sudden, extreme pain.”

“Right. Doctor, help me move her.”

“Huh? I— right.” The Doctor seemed startled at Rory giving _him_ an order but quickly overrode the impulse, moving to pick up the woman’s feet so Rory could straighten her out. “What’s her name?”

“Jaiya Dunn,” Selene said.

“What happened to you, Selene?” Amy asked. She stood somewhat awkwardly to the side, at a loss for what to do.

“I was blind-sided by a fast-moving debris field coming around the moon. I had insufficient engine power to evade all of it. A piece went right through my navigation array.”

“Hey now, easy,” Rory said. He’d dropped to his knees. He had a stethoscope around his neck and a penlight in one hand and Jaiya was flinching away from his attempts to look at her eyes, screaming with nearly every breath. “We’re here to help you, Jaiya. Selene, does she have any medical history we should know?”

“A tendency toward hypertension is noted in her file. What else are you concerned about?”

“I don’t know…seizures? Psychosis?”

“Is she telepathically sensitive?” The Doctor asked.

“Come again?” Rory said.

“Yes, she is,” Selene said. “Seven generations in the family, she’s told me.”

The Doctor, crouching, moved up toward Jaiya’s head. “Hello, Jaiya.” He stretched a hand toward her face, fingers sinking into the slightly frizzy black hair. “Let me have a look— yaaagh!” He yanked his hand away as if it were burned. “Yep. Definitely psychic. Dangerously strong.” He shook his own head hard, trying to clear it.

“Okay, that’s…your thing,” Rory said. “Where’s it coming from?”

“Can’t tell. Best person to ask would be her, unfortunately.”

“Well then what do we do?” Rory struggled to hold her down by her shoulder with one hand and hold the stethoscope against her chest with the other. "Her heart rate…well assuming she’s human…human-ish? It’s out of control, if she’s human. How do I even tell?”

“I can provide you with her baseline vitals,” Selene said. A tablet popped out of one of the forward consoles and floated over to Rory. “Also, with the bridge first-aid kit. I deduce your spacecraft is employing some form of translation matrix.”

“Yes, yes, good, thank you!” Rory said. He pulled the tablet over and started to skim the screen while digging a blood pressure cuff out of his bag.

“Right,” The Doctor said, leaping to his feet. “I have an idea.”

#

Rory and The Doctor entered the TARDIS, carrying Jaiya slung between them, with Amy holding the door.

“Right down here,” the Doctor said, indicating the floor near the control console.

“Amy,” Rory said, “grab me a pillow and a blanket from our room.”

“Right,” Amy said, dashing upstairs.

Once they had set Jaiya down, The Doctor went to the control console. “Right, Selene, can you hear me?”

“Loud and clear, Doctor.”

“Right, take this data and integrate it into your comm link.”, The Doctor went on, rattling items off in the clipped tone that accompanied him Explaining A Plan. “In a moment I’m going to engage the Vortex Shields of the TARDIS. That will shield us from the psychic assault. But once I close the doors and engage the shield, no one gets in or out of here until I take them down again. One of us is going to want to stay out there and work on fixing you because you don’t want to be stuck drifting in the vicinity of a gas giant’s gravity.”

Amy returned, handing Rory the pillow and blanket. “Wait, who’s going out?”

“Well I need to monitor Jaiya,” Rory said, “The Doctor needs to work the TARDIS.”

Amy looked at Jaiya, still thrashing in pain, voice gone hoarse. She looked up at the Doctor. “Is whatever’s out there going to do that to me?”

“No, no, don’t be silly,” The Doctor said, still pushing buttons and throwing switches. “You don’t have the brain for it. I mean, uh, the psychic bits, sorry, that came out wrong, didn’t it?”

Amy rolled her eyes. “Okay, okay,” she said, deadpan, “but what about the brain for repairing a spaceship? I’ve definitely never repaired a spaceship.”

“My systems are designed to be user-serviceable by non-expert users,” Selene said. “I am able to walk you through all the steps.”

“Well, drifting in space is a bad plan.” She took a deep breath. “I’ll do it. You two, don’t go anywhere.” She and Rory exchanged a quiet look, a nod, and a quick kiss.

“Good, good, out you go, Pond. Close the door behind you! Make sure you have your cell phone, in case we lose contact with Selene!”

Amy patted her pocket. “Got it!” She closed the door behind her.

Closing the TARDIS door, Amy was suddenly surrounded by silence for the first time in several minutes. All the noise from within the TARDIS was contained by it. There was only the hum of Selene’s engine and generators.

“Right, Selene,” she said. “Where to?”

#

“Doctor, how much longer?” Jaiya had started to thrash about and Rory was trying to hold her down, struggling to get a pulse meter to stay on her hand.

“Few more seconds!” came the muffled voice. The Doctor had pulled of a side panel in the console and was neck deep in the innards. “Don’t want the shields going screwy in normal space!” A few seconds later he pulled himself out, a couple wires clenched in his hand. “Right, engaging shields in three, two, one.” _Click-thunk_, went the dramatically pulled lever.

The screaming stopped. Jaiya fell still, panting heavily, eyes darting about the room in confusion.

“Hi, Jaiya,” Rory said, placing a hand on her shoulder.

Jaiya blinked. “Who—” she began, but her voice came out with a croak. She swallowed and tried again. “Where…?”

“Jaiya, this is Rory, I’m The Doctor, you’re in the TARDIS,” The Doctor said. He came around and crouched by her other side while Rory dug a small bottled water from his bag and broke the seal on the cap. “Safest place in the universe.”

“Selene…?”

“I am in contact with The Doctor’s craft, Jaiya.” Selene spoke over the open comms. “I am damaged but I have the Doctor’s other crewmate working on field repairs.”

Rory offered her the water. Jaiya sat up shakily to take a swallow then lay back again while trying to process it all.

“Jaiya,” The Doctor said, “Can you tell me anything about what happened?”

Furrows formed on Jaiya’s brow. “You know about the collision?” The Doctor and Rory nodded. “Was getting a damage report.” To Rory’s ears, the TARDIS rendered her voice with something like an Australian accent if you wore it down by long travel. “Then…like something pierced right through my chest, burning hot.” She looked down at her own chest which was completely unmarred. “And didn’t stop.” She lifted a hand to the front of her jumpsuit, touch confirming visuals, neither of which she sounded like she believed. “And I was so alone.” Her voice and hands both started to tremble. Rory put a hand on her shoulder as her head fell back onto the pillow.

“Jaiya, look at me,” The Doctor said. Jaiya’s head inclined in his direction. “That wasn’t you, all right? It was something or someone else you were feeling. And if I have a good guess, possibly someone else hurt and alone…” He stretched a hand out to touch her forehead again.

An alarm went off. It was not the most urgent sounding of alarms, a sort of low, breathy “woo-woo-woo” like an owl hooting over a glass bottle. It still got The Doctor to spring up straight and attend to the TARDIS console.

“What’s wrong?” Rory said.

“Oooh, this isn’t good.”

“_What_ isn’t?”

“Our whatever-it-is is beating on the shields, metaphorically speaking,” The Doctor said, adjusting a couple knobs, then frowning more deeply. “And the TARDIS is feeling it. It’s strong enough to overload the telepathic circuits.”

Rory’s eyes widened, vividly remembering having met a personification of the living being that made up the TARDIS. Jaiya looked on in fear and confusion.

“How bad?” Rory asked.

A fast, more insistent, buzzing alarm joined the first. “Dammit,” The Doctor swore, bending down to stick his head in the previously exposed panel. “Jaiya, I’m sorry, I’m going to have to recalibrate the shields so they aren’t taking the full brunt of the signal and that means some of it is going to get through to you.”

“Nuuuh!” Jaiya moaned in protest, colour draining from her face.

“Doctor, I don’t think that—” Rory tried to object.

“No, it’s _not_ good,” The Doctor cut in, “but it’s the only thing I can do fast enough.” There was barely-restrained panic in his tone. “If the circuits blow, we lose the shields, she takes the full force again _and_ the TARDIS is disabled, so we’re back where we started and worse. Brace for it!”

Jaiya shook her head frantically. Rory scowled in the face of impossibility as he clasped Jaiya’s hand. There was the ‘thunk’ of another dramatic lever being thrown. Jaiya cried out with the jolt, Rory winced both in empathy and at the crushing force she returned his grasp with. Her eyes went unfocused again, her pulse shot up and her breathing quickened. The cry of pain did not rise into a scream but it trailed off into a soul-wrenching moan.

The Doctor stood over the console, panting slightly himself. “All right,” he said, looking grimly from the console to Rory and Jaiya. “It’s stable, for now. We’ll keep working on it.”

#

Amy scowled, staring at what, to her, was an unintelligible jumble of wires, plugs and support lattice, one hand holding a large part, one holding a smaller part. “Read that number off to me again?”

Selene rattled off a ten-digit string of letters and numbers. Amy squinted at the label on the small piece in her hand, scowled some more, put it back on the floor with the array of other parts spread out around _ Selene _’s pilot chair and started hunting for the correct one. “Would be nicer if they, I don’t know, colour coded these or something.”

“You’re doing fine, Amy,” Selene said. “I wish I could be more useful but my optical processors are insufficient for reading fine print.”

“Really? This far in the future? I’m pretty sure there’s cameras in _my_ time that could manage it.”

“The Cartel contractors who designed me deemed it more prudent to enhance my external sensory capabilities.”

“So basically, you’re saying they cheaped out on them.”

“It is true that money was listed as a concern.”

Amy sighed, and a moment later, found the correct part. Most of the connectors snapped together with the larger assembly in her hand. A couple bits had threaded sleeves that required screwing down. Amy twisted them until they were finger-tight then reached back for the self-adjusting wrench she had set on the console. As she grabbed for it, she knocked something else down. Turning around, she picked the object up: a magnetic picture frame containing a photo of Jaiya and two young children, each clinging to one of her arms.

“Are these her kids?”

Selene’s presence module swung around to look. “The photograph? Yes, those are her children.”

“Where are they?”

“The children stay with their aunt and uncle when she must go on these runs.”

“Is that often?”

“Increasingly so. Living expenses are rising.”

Amy pursed her lips together. “S’not right,” she muttered, putting the picture back and turning back to the repair work.

“Hmm?”

“Not getting to see your kids grow up.” She sighed. “I have a daughter. She got taken away from me. We’re on good terms now but it’s…complicated.”

“I see. If it’s any consolation, by doing a few trade runs a year, Jaiya is able to work less the rest of the time.”

“It is, a bit.” Amy gave the fastener she was wrenching a final tug, then decided to change the subject. “Are you worried about Jaiya?”

“I do not have the capacity for worry,” Selene said. “Next part is number 48377-B. I am programmed to value the well-being of my pilot. I gather it is not exactly the same.”

Amy had to think about that as she found the part, which looked like a computer board, and snapped it in place. “No, probably not.”

“Next, number 48349. I can say that we have worked together for a long time,” Selene went on. “By any objective criteria I can evaluate, I believe she’s a good person. Losing her would be a detriment to those who know her.”

Amy nodded. There wasn’t much else she could add. “Next part?”

“Almost done. This will go into the module housing. Then you’ll bag everything up and we’ll get you into a space suit to do the installation.”

“Wait. Hold on. _Space suit_? No one said anything about a space suit.”

#

_ Whirr-ble-whirr-ble-whirr-ble _. “Rory, you find the neuroelectric sensors yet?” The Doctor was sitting cross-legged by Jaiya’s head, sonic screwdriver in one hand, a circular strap with an array of half-assembled electronic bits in the other. The display of the pulse meter was set on the floor where he could see it.

“Was that the blue chip with the red contacts or the red with the blue ones?” Rory had a box of apparently random parts and was eyeing a plastic bag of multicoloured, thumbnail-sized circuits.

“Red with the blue.”

Rory dug a hand into the bag to start sifting through them. “Right. So you going to tell me what you’re doing now that you’re settled in to working on it?”

“Yeah, sorry, get like that when the mind is racing.” He accepted a chip from Rory and started fitting it into place. “I think the only way to stop the signal is find what’s making it. Now what I _gather_ is Jaiya’s got long range sense but not much control. I’ve _got_ telepathic senses and a lot of control but they’re more of a short range thing.” _Whirr-ble-whiir-ble_. “Another chip, thank you, and can you grab that wire spool next please? Now even with the shields damping the signal, it’s too strong to let me maintain contact with her long enough. Hence the need for an intermediate interface.” He glanced at Jaiya and then froze. “Uh, her pulse numbers aren’t supposed to be going all wibbly like that, are they?”

Rory swore, hurrying back to Jaiya’s side and dropping the wire spool to rummage in his bag. “Ventricular fibrillation,” he muttered, pulling a red plastic case the size of a large book from it.

“Come again?”

“Heart threatening to give out from the strain.” He popped the latch on the case of the portable defibrillator and hit the power button. Then hit it again, looking panicky. “Bloody battery! It should be within the lifespan of normal—” He stopped, looking suddenly uncertain. Then he cast the defibrillator aside. “Desperate times,” he said. With one hand, he felt down the centre of Jaiya’s chest. Then with his other hand, he made a fist over the spot, raised it, and brought it down in a sharp strike.

“Whoa!” The Doctor nearly jumped.

Jaiya let out a sharp gasp and her breathing, which had started to sound laboured, deepened again. Rory put on his stethoscope and press it to Jaiya’s chest, panic receding.

“That doesn’t often work,” he admitted.

“A shock to reset the heart rhythm?” The Doctor guessed.

“Yeah. The defibrillator is better and safer, it does it with electricity. But with everything that’s gone on, including the time travel…I’m not sure how long it’s been since I changed the battery.” He looked shamefaced as he admitted this.

“And her heart’s at risk of doing that again?”

“Yeah. I gave her the blood pressure syringe from Selene’s kit but the stress and adrenaline are working against it.”

The Doctor put down the gadget he’d been working on. “Let me see that thing.”

#

Aboard _ Selene _, an airlock hissed open onto an unpressurised corridor.

“Hold on to the tether until you have oriented yourself.” Selene’s instructions were delivered in a calm and measured tone. “When you are ready, pull yourself to the nearest handhold and advance forward as if you were climbing a ladder with your hands.”

“I feel like I’m going to hurl,” a spacesuit-clad Amy said, as she floated in the hatch-way.

“In the light of present evidence, I can believe you when you said you had no null-gravity training,” Selene said, a disembodied voice in the suit speaking bemused words in a calculated neutral tone. “It is still highly improbable, in my experience, that one can travel out here without having at least drilled the fundamentals.”

“Assuming I have _any_ idea what I’m doing right now is a bad plan,” Amy muttered, slightly snappish. She made herself take deep breaths and focused on the far end of the service corridor while her brain and her stomach wrestled with the loss of familiar concepts like ‘up’ and ‘down’. The walls, covered in exposed mechanical and electronic bits suspended on a metallic lattice, sloped oddly. Amy understood that she was in one of the protruding, triangular fins of the spaceship but it didn’t help her currently-handicapped sense of perspective. The corridor was lit only by rows of small guide lamps attached to the handholds and the headlamp of Amy’s helmet. Near the tip of the fin, she could see the debris of the wreckage that had crippled Selene. “Whose bright idea was it to not run the artificial gravity in the whole ship?” She began traversing the corridor, one handhold at a time, a tote bag on a strap floating behind her. The spacesuit was bulky and stiff, slowing her movement and souring her mood further. “Or, for that matter, don’t you have some sort of deflector shields in this century?”

“The Cartel’s newest ships are equipped with full-envelope deflector shields,” Selene said. “However it is not economical to discontinue flying the older ships until they have reached their maximum operational lifespan.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet,” Amy said. “Bloody cheap-ass…” Then she realized what she was talking to and paused in her forward movement. “Nothing against you personally,” she added.

“No offence is taken. I was made this way and I can only be what I am. As long as I can be that to the best of my capability, I have worth.”

Amy’s hand gripped the handrail a little tighter. Something in what Selene said struck her. She had to remind herself to breathe again; she would have to process this later. “Well we can get you less broken.” She began to move forward again.

#

Rory, kneeling by Jaiya, gave the hand crank an experimental turn. The crank and the box it was attached to looked like a thing from an old Victorian device. It was wired to a bundle of cobbled-together electronic bits that he couldn’t make head or tail of and that was wired to the now-exposed battery leads of the defibrillator. The defibrillator woke up and beeped, the screen taking input from the electrode leads that were now taped to Jaiya’s chest.

“Ah, good,” The Doctor said, glancing up from the headband he was now absorbed in assembling again. “It works.”

“What, did you doubt it would?” Rory asked.

The Doctor paused a second. “No,” he said, shortly, before resuming.

Rory scowled; he’d known the Doctor long enough that some of his smaller lies were becoming transparent. It wasn’t worth dwelling on. There was a patient in front of him. He kept turning the crank with one hand as he reached for a small towel. The front of Jaiya’s jumpsuit had been unzipped, draped for what modesty was possible. Both her chest and face were slick with sweat. Her eyes, half open, were glazed. There were muttered words between moans but they were unintelligible. Translation circuits notwithstanding, Rory wasn’t sure they were even English. She didn’t have a fever, yet she was sweating as if she were in a sauna. He used the towel to wipe the sweat off, both a gesture of comfort and a precaution to keep the electrodes dry.

“How much longer, do you think?” Rory said.

The Doctor made a non-committal “hmm”. A moment later, he glanced up, sensing more of an answer was expected. “Hm, well, it depends.” He glanced in the direction of the TARDIS console. “Doctor to _ Selene _. How’s everything going?”

#

“Installation of the replacement parts is underway, Doctor,” Selene said.

“If I can get it out of the bloody bag!” Amy, now attached to the nearest handrail by a clip, was fumbling with the tote’s fasteners. The gloves of the space suit were bulky and stiff. Clipped to another rail was a drawstring bag which she had used to scoop up the loose debris and broken bits left by the impact. Within arm’s reach and a short float of her, a grapefruit-sized hole, jagged metal edges bent inwards, marked the entry wound left by the chunk of space rock moving at greater-than-ballistic speed. Amy did not want to be thinking about what could happen if more of those came along and trying to not think about it was wearing her already frayed nerves.

The tote slipped out of her hand and drifted back, tugging on its tether, the flap dangling open. “Argh!” Angrily, she tugged back. This brought the tote careening into her, the weight upsetting her balance and half-spinning her backwards. “Shit, shit, shit!”

“You all right, Pond?”

Amy, flailing, managed to get a hand on a rail. “No!” The feeling of wanting to throw up was back. “I’m rubbish at this!”

“You are having understandable difficulties, Amy,” Selene said. “I suggest taking a moment to calm down.”

“Yeah, what she said.” The Doctor’s tone had the awkward edge of a worried person trying to be reassuring.

Amy hung in mid-vacuum, breathing hard. There wasn’t much else she could do.

“Is Rory there?” she asked, after a moment.

“Yeah. Still here.” Rory’s voice was slightly distant. “The Doctor’s close to figuring out what’s messing with Jaiya, I’ve got to—” There was a shrill electronic ‘beeeeeep’. “Dammit!”

“What’s wrong?”

#

Jaiya’s eyes were rolled up in her head. Rory turned the hand crank on the generator franticly, watching the numbers on the defibrillator readout. “75…” he muttered through clenched teeth. He tried turning the crank faster. “Doctor, can this thing be sped up any?”

_ Whrrrble-whrrrble-whiirble. _ The Doctor, crouched anxiously across from Rory, made some small, unseen adjustment with the sonic. “Better?”

“100…125…yes, better. 150…” The numbers moved steadily but time seemed to crawl. The defibrillator beeped. “200. Hands clear!” His free hand pushed the large red button on the device.

Jaiya’s body jerked and she let out an involuntary gasp. Her lungs managed another breath to follow it, which came out in a tortured moan. Rory reached over her neck to check her pulse manually.

“Rory?” Amy’s worried voice came over the comm.

“She’s steady again,” he said, carefully keeping his tone flat. “But I don’t know how much more she can take.”

“Dying…” The word came out of Jaiya, thin, hoarse, quavering with her breath. “Die…” It was the first comprehensible sound she’d made in many minutes. “Let…me…die…”

The Doctor opened his mouth to speak.

“No.” Rory’s voice was hard. He placed a hand on her shoulder. “Jaiya, listen.” Her head didn’t move, though her eyes swivelled, struggling to focus. “It hurts worse than anything, I know, but I promise we’re going to get this sorted.”

“Yeah, you listen to him, Jaiya.” Amy, still floating in vacuum somewhere, added her voice, strained and breathless as it was, to the encouragement. “Your kids…what are their names? You want to see them again, don’t you?”

“Chinwe…” Jaiya muttered. “Ekene…”

“Please hang in there, Jaiya,” Selene said

The Doctor’s mouth closed, then opened again. “Good” he said, looking squarely at Rory before turning around and gathering up the parts of the device he had been working on. “Yes, yes, hold that thought!” He began seating and adjusting the device around Jaiya’s forehead. “No dying today, all right?”

“You’ve got it done?” Rory said.

“Complete truth? It’s a rush job.” The Doctor was suddenly sombre as he started fitting the other band around his own head. “It will do the trick but it’s not going to be easy or comfortable for either of us.” He looked back up at Rory and looked him squarely in the eye. “I’m going to be pretty blind to the world while doing this. I’m pretty sure I can take whatever this throws at me, but I want you looking out for the both of us.”

Rory took the weight of that statement and nodded. “I will.”

#

Telepathy was first nature to the Doctor. It was just another sense organ. As his companions generally saw it, most telepathic interactions took seconds.

This was not ‘generally’. He had felt, at a distance, the roiling mess in Jaiya’s mind from the moment they found her. It was like looking into a bright light; uncomfortable, but at that distance, he could tolerate it easily by doing the mental equivalent of looking away and squinting. The first attempt at contact with her had been like opening his eyes and looking directly into a blue-white sun.

This time, he eased up to her cautiously, opening the eye of his mind a bit at a time. The neural interface provided a sort of crude screen between him and her as well as a connection to the TARDIS translation circuits, though it also dulled the clarity of what he was seeing. Still, he could make out two distinct parts. The part that was Jaiya, familiarly small and human, noticed his presence about as much as she noticed his physical presence on the TARDIS: barely. There were the surface thoughts, feebly trying to hang on to some sense of self and to the desire to live. Those and the rest of her were being crowded, smothered by—

He flinched, cringing. He was aware of his body flinching as well, of his breath-rhythm changing, and seconds later a touch—Rory’s—on his wrist. Inside, he steeled himself and tried to look again. Something large, powerful. Mentally, so much more raw power than a Time Lord, but lacking in most of the complexity. Very nearly single-minded, in fact, though the thoughts throbbing in it were the sort that could take over most minds. _ Pain _ _ …dying… _

“_Yes, yes, that much is obvious, hello, I’m the Doctor, I know you’re in pain but could you think a little quieter, maybe stop grabbing my friend Jaiya here so tightly?”_

The Doctor felt himself noticed. It took a few seconds for the being to process what it had just sensed. Instead of loosening, the grip stiffened. The return thought: _ “Alone…” _

“_Not alone. We will come find you. But I need you to tell me where you are.”_

A black sky, stars nearly undimmed by atmosphere. The rim of a rocky cliff seen from the bottom. _ “Here.” _ The live view, the Doctor reasoned, but he needed more context. He looked back along the timeline of memory. Rocks falling down the cliff as the ground underneath quivers. The memory of the pain of impact forced sound from his lips; distantly, he heard Jaiya cry out at the same time.

He forced himself to look past the pain, feeling the strain of the effort as the other mind shuddered and clenched tighter. _ “Easy! Easy, come on, a bit more now…” _ A plume of dust being thrown nearly a kilometre into the thin air as if by some impact. Red lights in the sky streaking toward the ground at supersonic speed…

Something spasmed violently. The Doctor lost concentration and broke contact.

“Doctor?” Rory, red-faced, was trying to hold Jaiya’s head down as she convulsed. He reached out with one hand to keep the Doctor, kneeling across from him, from tottering forward on top of her.

The Doctor winced, finding his hands and pushing himself back up. “I’m all right. Bit of a mental whiplash. Whatever’s on the other end is not in good shape and getting worse.” Head still ringing, but also racing with thoughts, he reached out with his mind to the TARDIS: “_ Can you bear a bit more? _ _ ” _ He felt the affirmative reply. _ “Share it with me if you need to,” _ he thought. “Right,” he said aloud, “I’m going to risk turning the shields up a bit more, buy Jaiya a bit more time.” He pulled himself upright to work the console. “Selene? I have a hypothesis. That debris field you ran into, can you track it’s path?”

“Loading archived data into computational array.” Selene replied.

“See if any of it might have collided with that moon. Also, I’m going to have the TARDIS send you some image data.” He closed his eyes a moment to bring back the image of the stars from the bottom of the crevice. “See if you can cross reference the astrogation data with any debris impacts.”

“Astrogation analysis will have to wait until the navigational array is back online. But Doctor, if we are dealing with an entity, scans of the moon below us register no life signs, nor is there enough atmosphere to easily support complex life.”

“If it’s possible to astound you, Selene, I think I could astound you with how little most people’s ‘scanning for life signs’ actually registers.”

#

Amy took another deep breath. Her feet were hooked as tight as she could around one of the handholds. The suit tether was hooked to one close to her head and pulled as tight as she could make it. With both hands, she held the navigation assembly, about the size and shape of an oversized laptop once all snapped into its encasement. Slowly, she pushed it forward until the edge lined with metallic contacts slid into the slot designed to take them. Holding it in place with one hand, she pulled up on a lever which, after a brief resistance, fit over the top edge and pulled the sides of the slot into a snug fit.

“Selene?”

“Connection established. Initiating self-test. …Self-test complete, no errors.”

Amy let out the breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding. Around her, the _ Selene _ hummed and creaked as it engaged its drives and began adjusting itself. “Amy to the TARDIS. The navigation array is in. Can I get out of this space suit now?”

“Good, wait one moment. Selene?” Amy noticed the Doctor sounded tired.

“Doing the astrogation analysis now.” There was a moment’s pause. “I have a coordinate set matching your parameters, Doctor.”

“Excellent. Give me that and I can—” The comm link erupted with static, over which Amy heard Jaiya’s pained cry.

Amy felt a wave of panic. “Doctor!”

“Still here!” the Doctor yelled. “Easy, old girl,” he said, more quietly. The static subsided. “Ok, making the TARDIS do more work right now is a bad plan. Selene, do you have any sort of transmat system?”

“I am equipped with a short-range transmat for orbit-to-surface cargo and personnel delivery.”

“Right. Amy, stay in the space suit.”

Amy groaned.

“Selene, get into a parking orbit over those coordinates. Amy, the entity causing all this is somewhere in that area, it’s hurt and it’s dying. It’s going to be up to you to get on the ground and see what’s going on down there.”

Amy gulped down both fear and bile, self-pity momentarily forgotten. “What exactly am I looking for?”

“I’m afraid you’re going to have to find that out.”

#

There was no sun in the sky. There was, however, an abundance of planetshine. The gas giant this moon was orbiting, filled nearly half of the horizon here while being two-thirds of the way above it. The light, only slightly orange-tinted, cast hard shadows the terrain. Craters of all sizes had been formed then eroded by the wind of the moon’s thin atmosphere; the cones of volcanic mountains rose in the distance, dark shapes against the black sky.

Going in the blink (or more accurately the deliberately tightly shut) of an eye from _ Selene _ ’s cargo bay to the surface, Amy _ had _ to gawk. Desperate mission or no, she would have been slightly less human if she hadn’t.

Once the initial astonishment subsided, she turned to get her bearings. At this point she made the very human mistake of not accounting for gravity about half of Earth’s. She lost balance, bounced as she over-corrected trying to regain it, and only caught herself hard on the nearby cliff face with luck and wild swinging of arms.

“Careful,” Selene said. “Move slowly until you adjust.”

“At least I don’t feel sick anymore,” Amy muttered as she caught her breath and re-established her balance. “Amy to the TARDIS. I’m here.”

“Good. Selene, keep the comms open. Amy, look around for anything that looks like a rock fall. You shouldn’t have to go far.”

Amy turned away from the cliff face to scan the area. It didn’t take long. “I see something,” she said. She tested herself with one step forward and then a few more. The ground was hard packed, coated in thin dust and enough dislodged stones that made placing her feet tricky. “Pretty large,” she continued, sizing up the pile of large, jaggedly rectangular rocks piled at the bottom. “Going to take me a couple minutes to walk around it without tripping on things.”

“Any sign something might be _under_ the rocks?”

She was distracted a moment, stepping around a pooling rivulet of slightly-glowing magma-like fluid that boiled in the near vacuum. It took her a moment to register the Doctor’s question and another moment that the fluid was running out from within the rock pile and how, from _ this _ perspective—

“Oh God,” she whispered.

“Amy?” said a suddenly attentive and worried Rory on the other end of the comms.

Amy opened her mouth but the words caught between disbelief and the reality of the sight in front of her. “Giant…”

“A giant _what_?” The Doctor prompted.

“No, no,” Amy stammered, half-breathless. “A giant…an _actual_ giant.”

She continued to stare. The body of the stricken creature seemed made of the same rock that made up the moon’s surface. It was larger than a train car, almost as large as two if you spread the volume of the second one around. It looked vaguely bipedal although its back bent strangely and the top of its chest jutted out with shoulders connecting near the front. Its legs and the bottom of its torso were pinned under the rockfall, one leg jutting out at an uncomfortable-looking angle. Between the rocks, its vital fluid dripped and bubbled.

The Doctor started to say something, but the giant’s body spasmed. In the TARDIS, Jaiya screamed, the reception crackled, and she thought she heard the Doctor grunt as well.

”Doctor? Amy to the TARDIS?” A hand started to reach for her pocket with the cell phone before she remembered the space suit and cursed it some more. New plan. “Selene? Are you seeing this?”

“I see what you see. I can send a video feed to the TARDIS but she is having difficulty holding a connection right now.”

“Can you…beam any of these rocks off, or something?”

“They will be difficult for me to target accurately without also picking up the creature. It will not fit in my cargo hold. Your suit is equipped with mechanical augments that can multiply your effective strength. That may be more immediately useful.”

Amy half-stepped, half stumbled forward as the building sense of urgency made her momentarily forget the gravity difference. She tested Selene’s suggestion by reaching around and prying at a boulder next to the giant’s thigh. There was resistance, then something in her suit hummed and whirred, the resistance buckled and the waist-high boulder tumbled over to the side.

“Oooo-kay then.” She eyed the still-shuddering bulk of the giant. She might not have had psychic senses but in this moment, she could feel an echo of it’s pain. Decisions crystallized. On hands and knees, she scrambled, clawing and slipping, up the sides of the giant’s belly. The stone on its chest was flattish and wide; peaking out one side was the oozing edges of a crater-like wound.

“Rory, you there?” She had a moment’s doubt trying to think whether it would be better or worse to move this stone and she wanted his opinion. The only answer that came back was a spike of static crackle. Wing it, then. She bent down and braced her feet as best she could while gripping the lip of the boulder. She lifted. The suit hummed and whirred and the stone began to come up, but even half-gravity gave a lot of weight to this mass. The giant’s bulk twitched, Amy lost her feet and leverage, belly-flopped hard with a gasp, and there was just enough air to convey scream the giant made when the stone shifted, like nails on chalkboard shifted down several pitches.

“Propulsion jet assist is available,” Selene said. “I can engage it on your mark.”

“Pro…yes, okay!” She found an eroded ridge between the giant’s torso and hip and set her feet again. She got her weight as low to the boulder as she could and pushed. The suit engaged, the boulder inched upwards. Closer…closer…it rose enough for her to get as far under it as she dared. “Do it!” There was a hissing roar of exhaust venting and she felt herself pushed up into the stone…

#

Rory felt his panic rise. He knew how to be brave, but things were spiralling out of control around him. He’d heard Amy call to him and when he’d called back there was no reply. Jaiya’s scream rang in his head and there was nothing more he could do but hold her trembling limbs. The lights in the TARDIS flickered and the _ woo-woo-woo _ alarm came on again. Worse, the Doctor was being affected too; still on his feet but clinging to the edge of the control console with white knuckles and gritted teeth. If the Doctor went down—

Everything went silent. There was only the hum of the TARDIS and the labouring of all their breaths.

The Doctor, rattled, straightened himself up slowly. “That did something. Amy? Come in, Amy…”

“Here.”

The tension ran out of Rory’s shoulders like water. “Thank god.”

“I moved the stone I think was hurting it the most.” There was a pause. She sounded out of breath and shaky. “I’m not sure that was right but I don’t know what else to do. This…this is pretty messed up.”

“I have imagery for you, Doctor,” Selene said.

The Doctor pulled up a viewscreen, saw what Amy was seeing and frowned. “Yeah. …Yeah.” His usually frantic energy was draining away. “Selene, have you got an extra space suit?”

“I do.”

“The psychic pressure’s been reduced. I think I can drop the shields long enough to come out of the TARDIS and join you down there.”

#

Amy had rolled away a few more of the larger rocks. Her weight by itself seemed negligible to the giant and its spasms had subsided to a tremble so she knelt against its chest. The blocky head, edges worn by the dust of many winds, had glassy orbs that seemed like eyes but nothing else that could be interpreted as a face or an expression. Little had changed, except the fluid leaking from the crater in its chest seemed darker.

The Doctor came up beside her with a couple easy bounds. He had the sonic screwdriver in hand and it was running, though Amy could barely hear the _ whrrr-ble _.

“Much too late,” he said, flatly, looking up at its eyes. “Probably a very small window where we could have hoped to save it. Too much damage, too much heat loss.”

They both looked down in silence.

“All you can do,” Rory said, over the comm link, “is what you can to make the patient comfortable.”

“Yeah,” the Doctor said. “I know.” He started fiddling with the sonic. Amy thought she heard him muter something about resonance frequencies.

“A caution,” Selene said, tone unchanged but her volume reduced out of respect. “The space suits are not rated for extended EVA. Radiation exposure may become a concern after approximately sixty minutes.”

The Doctor nodded. “Amy. Go on back up. I’ll stay and deal with it.”

Amy braced a hand against the cliff face to pull herself up. “All right,” she said. There was no snark left, just tired sadness. She scooted on her butt back down to the ground and walked some distance away. “Selene? Ready.”

“Transmat in five seconds,” Selene said, and five seconds later, Amy vanished.

The Doctor slid down after her, walking around to the giant’s head The giant wasn’t looking at him with its eyes, as far as he could tell, but he could feel its regard. _ “Sorry, big guy,” _ he thought to it, laying a hand there. _ “Time wasn’t on our side today.” _

“_Not alone”_, came the reply.

The Doctor nodded, trying not to wince much. He still wore his half of the psychic filtering headband but the giant’s thoughts and feelings rang all through his insides. Then he blinked as something pricked the outer range of his telepathic sense. He looked up. A shape moved out on the edge of clear vision. Two. Three. Plodding, but covering the distance in large strides, other giants were coming.

“_Call loud,”_ the dying giant said. _“Sorry for hurt.”_

“I understand,” the Doctor said, both aloud and in his head. He gave the sonic a final tweak, then raising it above his head, turned it on. The usual _whrr-ble_ was accompanied by a steady, almost musical tone.

The stone giant heaved, then settled. The Doctor felt its pain recede as the sound vibrations resonated in whatever it used for a brain and overrode those sensations. Its limbs went slack with a soft clatter; the trembling which vibrated the ground around it quieted.

#

Aboard the TARDIS, Rory watched as most of the tension fell out of Jaiya’s body. He paused in wiping her forehead with a damp towel and looked at her pulse readout on the screen. He reached for her neck to check by hand as well and breathed a sigh of relief. It was slowly dropping.

#

Many minutes later, the Doctor re-entered the TARDIS, sans spacesuit. Amy was there well before him. Working with Rory, she helped to hold Jaiya’s head up while Rory gave her sips of water from the bottle.

Jaiya’s body trembled with exhaustion. Her eyes were focusing correctly now, but the face she turned to the Doctor was dazed and her speech stuttered and slurred. “My ship…she’s…all right?”

“Fully operational,” the Doctor told her.

“My kids? I heard…I don’t know. Chinwe, Ekene, they…?”

The Doctor frowned slightly, then came to kneel beside her, next to Rory. “Your children are home, Jaiya.” He glanced at Amy and motioned for her to let Jaiya’s head down. “I’m sure they want to see you again. For that, what matters right now is that _ you _ are all right. ” He reached over and placed a hand on each of Jaiya’s temples. “For that to happen, you need to _ sleep _.”

The Time Lord’s eyes locked with Jaiya’s. She blinked. “Okay,” she mumbled weakly. The worry lines melted from her face, her shoulders started to go slack and her eyelids fluttered and drooped.

“Shh…There you go,” the Doctor said, softly. “It’s all right.”

Amy and Rory watched.

“Will she really be all right?” Amy said, once Jaiya seemed fully asleep.

“Physically?” Rory said. “Yeah. Her system took a ton of stress but she’ll recover with enough rest. _Mentally_?” He hesitated. “I’m not sure. You never are with trauma like that.”

“More pain than most humans live to tell about,” the Doctor murmured stroking Jaiya’s forehead. “More pain than _is human_.”

“Doctor,” Amy said, “You’ve…put stuff in my head before. Is there anything you can do for her? Maybe…if she doesn’t remember?” She spoke hesitantly, knowing she tread on shaky ground.

The Doctor scowled, but did not reproach her. “Don’t like messing with memories,” he said, and they all caught the dark edge in his voice. The edge softened. “Not that I haven’t done it for a good cause.” He kept stroking Jaiya’s forehead; Rory noticed a bit of the faraway look he’d noticed when the Doctor was using telepathy on her before. “It needn’t be so drastic as erasing,” the Doctor continued, half to himself. “I can go in and smooth the sharp bits off, dull the pain in them. She’ll be aware of what happened, in a fuzzy sort of way, but she won’t have to relive it every time she thinks about it…”

Amy looked at him. There was something about the way The Doctor’s voice trailed off, something about how it almost sounded like he was trying to convince himself. “But?” The Doctor’s hand fell still. “Come on,” Amy coaxed him. “I hear the ‘but’ in there.”

“To do it like that,” The Doctor said at last, “I’ve got to get close enough to feel all that pain. Not that I can’t take it,” he added, rather too quickly, “and it won’t be as bad since I can work fast…”

Amy looked at Rory. Rory looked at Amy. With unspoken agreement, they each put a hand on the Doctor’s shoulders. The Doctor looked surprised for a fraction of a second and looked from one to the other as he read their faces.

“Thanks,” he said, giving them a pained, yet grateful smile. He turned to face Jaiya, stretched his arms, and took a few deep breaths.

The work was done in silence, except for the Doctor’s screams. They echoed through the open doors of the TARDIS and into _ Selene _’s corridors. His companions held on and held him up.

#

Working together, Amy and Rory carried Jaiya to bed in her berth aboard the _ Selene _.

“Many thanks to you, Rory, and you, Amy.” Selene’s presence-node hung above them, swaying slightly on its rail as they laid her down in the sleeping cubby. “I can take over monitoring her from here.”

“Yeah,” Amy said. “You make sure she gets some vacation time after this, all right? _Paid_ vacation. Don’t let those cheap bastards stiff her.”

“I can start on the forms immediately,” Selene said, sounding cheerful. “And I will insist on it. Management can’t afford to have one of their ships unhappy with them.”

Amy looked over at Rory, who was making adjustments to Jaiya’s pillow. When he straightened himself up, she stepped over and wrapped him in a hug. “Good job,” she muttered, pressing her face against him.

He returned the hug. “You too.”

They went out together through a privacy curtain to the bridge. The Doctor was there, splayed out in the pilot’s chair, managing to look satisfied while also looking drawn and utterly exhausted. Amy and Rory gravitated to him. He reached up silently and clasped their hands and they clasped his back, and they spent a few moments like that just staring at the pink-and-orange of the receding gas giant and the dark shadow of a moon where stone giants lived and died and mourned their dead.

“I think,” the Doctor said, dryly, “we need a vacation to recover from our vacation. Selene, where are you headed now?”

“I will rendezvous with the Cartel outpost on Lucinda III to complete my delivery and file an incident report,” Selene said. “Lucinda III is a temperate world, recently colonized by the Galactic Federation, with a small spaceport and no tourist attractions of note.”

The Doctor relaxed back into the chair. “Sounds perfectly boring,” he said, closing his eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> Doctor Who and all associated characters copyright of the BBC Worldwide. The planet Emindar was plucked from a Whovian wiki and appears in the novel _Vanderdeken's Children_. Jaiya and Selene are original characters.
> 
> I'm an American but my spell check is set to UK English for another project, don't @ me for missing any British-isms. ;) (Or do, because I'm curious, but be nice.)
> 
> I write mostly original (currently unpublished) stuff but this story invaded my head one night and just refused to let go. Amy/Rory and Eleven is my current favorite Who era and I like that this plays with some aspects of them which are under-explored in the show. Rory gets to use his medical skills and take charge of a situation where The Doctor is out of his depth. The Doctor's psychic abilities take the spotlight in a way that's more involved than delivering messages or exposition. And poor Amy gets separated from the boys and has to work way out of her comfort zone while she's still processing the trauma of losing and finding her child and not getting to have a second chance, something _Asylum of the Daleks_ handled rather clumsily and dropped afterward.


End file.
